Living with Samsung Gear VR: A little something for everyone

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Don’t mistake Samsung’s Gear VR for a high-end gaming device. It’s not. Instead, it offers some compelling, if brief, virtual-reality experiences for techies and non-techies alike. Even those who are not impressed by the latest first-person shooter, intriguing VR experiences including Disneyland, Nepal, and the Blue Angels are likely to prove compelling.

The hardest part of getting the non-technical folks in your household (if you have any) excited about the Gear VR will be explaining to them how they get it to work without being able to see what they’re seeing. In my case, after doing my best to tee-up the “It’s a Small World” Disney experience before handing the Gear VR off, I was chagrined that the first thing it displayed was a warning about overheating. But eventually, the Gear VR delivered and my family was hooked.

The Gear VR experience

Up front, I want to make it clear that the Gear VR is not a classically great VR experience — although it is powered using Oculus software. Images are somewhat grainy — mostly because you are staring at your phone screen from a couple inches away, through lenses that are essentially magnifying glasses — and there can be some lag in fast-moving applications.

But the Gear VR is not a $2,000 Oculus dev kit, or even a $600 Oculus Rift attached to a high-end PC. It is a $100 headset coupled with a phone you already own (and it’s definitely not worth buying a new Samsung phone to run it!). Judged by that standard, it is pretty darn cool. For many it will be the first way they experience VR, and perhaps the only way for quite a while.

Applications and videos are hit or miss

There are a growing number of applications, and even more videos, for the Gear VR. It seems like the more impressive they are, the more they crash. Or at least, that has been my experience. JauntVR provides some amazing 360-degree experiences, but frequently caused the device to hang, overheat, or go black. I’m sure that will improve with time, or with more expensive devices like the Oculus Rift, but it can be very frustrating in the meantime.

To understand what’s possible on the Gear VR, we need to cover what it can and can’t do. It performs head tracking using the sensors on your phone (for that matter, essentially everything it does uses your phone’s electronics). With my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, the head tracking was pretty impressive, responding quickly in applications that didn’t add their own lag.

However, the Gear VR doesn’t have any positional tracking, so moving around in a VR scene doesn’t actually move you around. If you’re sitting in a fixed location, that’s probably fine, as you can’t move anyway. Instead, there is a touch-sensitive area on the right side of the goggles that you swipe in a direction to either navigate menus or move around. It is not the simplest system to use, and reminds me of the awkward swipe interface on Google Glass. But if you can develop a good sense of where to place your finger, it is usable. More serious gamers will want to add a Bluetooth-connected gaming controller to use.

The Gear VR can also use your phone’s camera (assuming you have the Gear VR’s cover off) to let you view the world in front of you. However, probably due to the limited power of the phone, there don’t seem to be any applications that do either object tracking, or any type of positional tracking using the camera, like the new, but much more expensive developer kit from Lumus and Infinity AR does.

Some things to try

Hollywood has begun moving into VR, starting with a dedicated VR experience at the trendy Sundance Film Festival. Gear VR owners can get the same experience for themselves, as the videos have been loaded into Samsung’s Milk VR library (although for some reason only until February 12th). Similarly, startup Jaunt VR has created some amazing 360-degree video experiences that you can view after downloading the free Jaunt VR app from the Oculus store. For family viewing, “It’s a Small World” is a good introduction, while “Nepal” provides a more dramatic adventure.

Next VR has been experimenting with live streaming various sporting events. I watched (a recorded version) of an NBA game, and wasn’t all that impressed. The 360 perspective puts you courtside, but because it doesn’t zoom in to the play, often the players around the ball were distant and blurry. I found the extreme sports experiences (like Supercross) more compelling, as the action is the main point of those experiences.

To see a glimpse of what the medium may become, GONE is an interactive combination TV series and video game made for VR. I had a hard time motivating myself to spin around looking for clues in the forest, but it pushes the boundaries of gaming and entertainment further than most of the other available content.

It is hard to show a picture of what it looks like inside a VR headset, but this artistic rendering provides some idea of the Gear VR Oculus UI

Unfortunately, content discovery and management is sort of a mess, split between the Oculus store, Samsung’s Milk VR library, and other walled-garden content libraries created by individual publishers. Some of these offer a search capability — although searching for anything using a Google touch pad is painful — while others don’t have any search function at all. For VR to move beyond the bleeding edge, this needs to change. Ironically, it is probably easier to manage content for the inexpensive Google Cardboard than for Gear VR, since Cardboard content comes in the form of Android apps you can get from the Play store using your phone UI.

VR content in general is certainly still suffering teething pains. I found a couple issues that were consistent across many of the available videos. The first is that some make too much use of 360 — I guess just to show off. For example, the U2 video has each performer appear at a different compass point around you. That makes the video hard to watch unless you’re sitting on a swivel chair, and even then is likely to start making you dizzy.

The second issue is related, as once you’ve started to look around (especially on the recommended swivel chair), it can be hard to figure out where you “should” be looking to follow the narrator. For example, as I “wandered through” the Holy Land video, the narrator would helpfully point out facts about one of the surrounding buildings. But I found myself getting confused about which direction I needed to look to see it.

Similarly, in Nepal, action might start to unfold in a direction away from where I was looking, and require some experimentation and rewinding to find it. Traditional film directors address this issue by directing our attention through camera position, zoom, and focus, but immersive videos leave that all up to us. The result is certainly an enhanced sense of place and presence, but not necessarily a better ability to follow the story.

It is difficult to categorize VR content. Some, like Netflix, is just 2D. Some is 3D, but still “flat screen.” Some provides 360 horizontal, and some is truly 360-degrees in ever direction.

Practicalities of using the Gear VR

The Gear VR is well-designed, and it is fairly easy to clip your phone into it. You do need to have one of the few supported phone models (S6, S6 edge, Note 6, S6+ Edge), though. There are several drawbacks to this constant plugging and unplugging. First, you’ll probably need to remove your phone case for it to fit. Second, if you accidentally hit the power button while inserting your phone — thus locking it — you’ll need to pull it back out again, unlock it, and start over (I have had this happen to me a lot).

It’s really easy to smudge the lenses in the Gear VR during the process of inserting and unloading the phone, so I found myself needing to wipe them fairly often. I used the Gear VR with glasses, with contacts, and with no correction (my eyes are only a couple diopters off normal). All three worked pretty well, although of course each change required tweaking the focus wheel. Of the three, I’d say contacts worked best in my case. Headphones also add to the experience, although they also add to the headache of getting set up. Some experiences can be streamed (you’ll need good bandwidth for this to work well), while others can only be downloaded (typically gigabytes even for a relatively short immersive video).

UPDATE: I got a chance to use a cool pair of wireless earbuds from Earin with my Gear VR, and they definitely offered an improved user experience compared to having to deal with plugging in a wired set and keeping the cord out of your way while moving around and running the Gear while immersed in virtual reality.

So, is the Gear VR worth $100?

If you have the money and a compatible phone, in a word, yes. Think about it. $100 is 6 tickets to a 3D movie. That’s 12 hours of virtual fun. At a minimum Gear VR is worth a few hours of tinkering, and you can impress your friends for at least 10 or 20 minutes each. Then there is the chance that you’ll actually get hooked on one of the games (and perhaps invest in a Bluetooth gamepad), and find endless hours of entertainment. Or you might decide that a private screening is the best way to watch your favorite movie on your next airplane flight — I know I’m always a little embarrassed when the R-rated scenes in one of my favorite TV series suddenly shows up on my laptop when I’m in an aisle seat and people are walking by. The same goes for your dorm room or apartment, and Gear VR has a cute Netflix app available.

It’s also not a long-term investment. If you love it, then you’ll probably figure out a way to upgrade to the Oculus Rift, or HTC Vive, and a powerful-enough computer to run one of them. Even if you don’t love it, it’s likely a better one will come along before the end of the year. So it’s best to think of it as an entertainment expense, like a movie or ticket to an amusement park. Of course, unlike with those, parking is free, and you can make your own popcorn.

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